THE OLD FUTILITY OF ART Knister's Poetry Peter Stevens M.LOST CRITICAL STATEMENTS about Raymond Knister's verse insist upon the vividness of his portrayal of Ontario farm life and the imagist nature of many of his poems. Early in his career Robert Finch "thought highly of these bare unmusical imagist verses" {Memoir by Dorothy Livesay) and in Canadian Literature No. 6 (Autumn i960) Milton Wilson presents him as a "writer of pastorals and herald of imagism". There is no doubt that many of Knister's poems comply with what the imagists decreed in their famous mani- festo was the best kind of verse, "hard and clear, never blurred and indefinite". In that key document of the imagist movement, Speculations, T. E. Hulme defined the new classicism in revolt against the sloppy romanticism of the verse of his day. This new verse had to be "strictly confined to the earthly and the definite", it had to be a poetry of "the light of ordinary day, never the light that never was on land or sea". Knister uses this hard precise manner in much of his poetry, which, as Leo Kennedy pointed out in Canadian Forum (September 1932), is a "bald expression of events" achieving its effects "without benefit of spangles". He singled out "Feed" as a good example; other poems using this straightforward objective imagist manner well are "The Hawk", "In The Rain 45 THE OLD FUTILITY OF ART Sowing Oats" and this passage from "After Exile" : The corn like drunken grenadiers Topples tarnished Whispering At the hooting train. Knister in his reviews of some long-forgotten volumes of poetry showed his concern for accuracy of observation and spare lean expression. He commended a poet for a "Spartan plainness which in itself is at least never a liability" {Poetry, October 1924), and he was suitably amazed when he found "nothing lush" in some poems about Hawaii {Poetry, May 1925). In articles for various periodicals in the nineteen twenties Knister applied these ideas about poetry to some Canadian poets. He shows a keen appreciation of Lampman's poetry, but he complains that he (Lampman) did not always "keep his eye accurately on the object" {Dalhousie Review, October 1927). In read- ing this review, one can sense how Knister must have felt a certain affinity to some elements in Lampman's poetry. In particular, he insists on the importance of nature and the natural scene in Lampman's work : Man was to turn to nature not because he was so much man that he was kin to all creation, but because he was tired, sick with being man, and desirous of rest and a forgetting within a serene impersonality, a soothing power to which he could moreover assign his own tempers. Although Knister was not really a descriptive poet of Lampman's kind, there is a suggestion that Knister feels in the other poet the sense of a separation be- tween man and nature. Knister's verse itself often suggests this lack of kinship between man and the natural creation. Man wrestles with the seemingly insur- mountable problems set by nature, whereas the creatures of nature are undis- mayed and unperturbed by them. This is what creates the tension in Knister's best poetry, the poems in which he allows the details to speak for themselves, not those poems in which he brings in a more or less overt moral comment. It is a lack of tension, according to Knister, that kept Lampman from greatness; there was "lack of tension between the poet and his environment". Thus, Knister complains that, although Lampman intuitively felt the alienation of nature from man, that feeling remained external. The conflict is between rather abstract concepts of Man and Nature and Lampman himself never becomes a part of the tension. In an article in Queen's Quarterly (May 1924), Knister makes the same kind 46 THE OLD FUTILITY OF ART of statement about Wilfred Campbell. Here he complains of Campbell's "reluc- tance to concern himself with the personal and the immediate". This reluctance, in Knister's estimation, leads to a failure of imagination, and Campbell is cate- gorized as an occasional poet interested in ornament and not truth: We find Wilfred Campbell, unable to find a subject within himself, and compelled to take one from exterior nature and decorate it as best he might. The true poet, then, according to Knister, looks into himself. As he says in the same article, "the subject is already within him, so that he merely allows this or that external circumstance to annotate it." I ROM THESE CRITICAL WRITINGS we can see that the element Knister admired in poetry, the element that he would try to reproduce in his own verse, was the subject within annotated by external circumstance, with a tension, explicit or implied, holding the poem in equilibrium. There is this kind of felt tension in Knister's best poetry, often suggested by the conflict between man and nature. In "Cross-bred Colt" the colt with its "fierceness of expression" faces the hired boy who "swung a clip to its muzzle". The poem ends with a sudden tense awareness: It turned away and stood awhile, Ears pricked, Considering — the first contact with man — Or was it pure surprise? The young colt in "The Colt" has more freedom and grace of movement than man, and the farmer's comment at the end of the poem, "Idle Colts! /Somehow nohow of any use!" emphasizes the world of difference between man and nature. Horses often become symbols of the stoic pattern of nature. They always show an acceptance of their lives; there is no effort on their parts to change, but they nearly always emerge with character, as in the series of poems, "A Row of Stalls", and with a sense of victory, as in "A Road", where in the deadness of winter all that shows above the ridges is "the breathmist of a horse", and man's dwellings are reduced to something "infinitely tiny, inappraisably lonely". Knister applies the word "patient" to the horses in "The Plowman" and "Lake Harvest" and in both these poems, the horse's calm acceptance is contrasted to man's labour, 47 THE OLD FUTILITY OF ART which often seems so futile in most of Knister's poetry. The horses seek no mean- ing beyond themselves, beyond their own existence : We are not done with toil : Let rain work in these hours, Wind in night's hours, We with the sun together Tomorrow. ("Stable Talk".) Is their patience a lesson for man? Must man merely accept his labour and not be troubled by extraneous thought? In "In The Rain, Sowing Oats" the horses accept the pain and suffering of their labour without any comment, where- as the man, bothered by the bad weather and the hard work, plagues himself with thoughts about the horses eating too much grain and thoughts of his own supper. This implied acceptance of life by the horses does not mean that their world is still, calm and lifeless. Nature is constantly on the move in Knister's verse. Indeed, this is one of man's great burdens : he can never fix nature, make some- thing permanent. Knister's vision of nature is one of constant change; man has a very precarious grasp of the world. There is almost an element of the menace of natural objects in many of Knister's poems. Mud slithers, trees wait expectant, winds are not to be trusted for they are gentle and strong, "erratically so steady" ("Night Walk"), the hawk moves "against a grimy and tattered/Sky" coming from "trembling tiny forests/With the steel of your wings". By the motion and menace man is almost overwhelmed and submerged. The succession of bleak details of continuance in "Reverie: The Orchard on the Slope" suggests no place for man. The snow in "Snowfall" almost obliterates the desire for life, lulling "the fever/with pale bright sleep", and the succumbing to these natural forces becomes more explicit in "October Stars". So far, much of what has been said about Knister could be applied to other poets who see nature as being alien to man. Other poets have suggested man's impermanence and transitory stay in the natural scheme. Poetry has often been used to suggest man's futile attempts to impose order on a constantly shifting landscape and to state that this futility arises because man does not have the patience or stoicism to accept the fact that he is working with, trying to arrange a pattern in his life with recalcitrant material. Looked at in this way, Knister's poetry does not seem very individual, apart from an occasional exactness of 48 THE OLD FUTILITY OF ART observation. Is this all there is in Knister's meagre collected poetry? What has happened to "the subject within himself"? Does Knister fail in his own poetry to apply the rigorous demands he makes of Campbell, to make the external circum- stances annotate "the subject within himself"? The answer lies, I think, in the poem, "Moments When I'm Feeling Poems". In this poem there is a conflict between the poet's vision and the inadequacy of language to express that vision. This is the "old futility of art." Words always distort the poet's vision; the people who accept this inadequacy of language are "the ladies and the lords/Of life", for they "feel/No call to blight that sense with words". Doesn't this lead us back to the essential problem of Imagism? The Imagists believed that an image is, in Pound's definition, "that which presents an intel- lectual and emotional complex in an instant of time".